The Jumanji franchise has been enjoyably revived in the last few years, but the new reboot films don’t have the purely startling quality of the original fantasy-surreal adventure from 1995, now rereleased for its 30th anniversary. Adapted from a 1981 children’s picture book by Chris Van Allsburg, it starred Robin Williams in an exuberant, winning but notably controlled lead performance. This is an entertainment in the broad Hollywood tradition of Capra and Spielberg, with a boisterous touch of Peter Pan in that the stern father figure and the scary villain are both played by the same actor. But there’s something else, too, a dash of something that, if it were played straight, would be genuinely creepy. And actually, even played just the way it is, it’s still pretty creepy.
Williams plays Alan Parrish, a guy who in his childhood of the late-1960s found himself marooned inside the bizarre internal world of a crazy Kiplingesque board game called Jumanji. A couple of recently orphaned kids, Peter and Judy (played by Bradley Pierce and Kirsten Dunst), chance upon this musty old game in the attic of their new house; they roll the correct numbers on the dice and release the crazed and disoriented Alan, whose strange and presumably jungle-dwelling garb is the only direct clue we will have to what his life has been like inside.
But it isn’t just Alan who gets out; the game also disgorges a lot of nasty insects, crazy monkeys, rhinos, lions, icky venom-spitting plants and a rifle-wielding pith-helmet-wearing colonial-era Brit, played (like Alan’s stern dad) by Jonathan Hyde. The only way to get them all back inside is to continue the game that Alan started as a kid, to the end. And to do that they will have track down the now grownup woman that Alan was playing with at the time: the intensely messed-up Sarah Whittle, played by Bonnie Hunt.
All those crazy creatures rampaging through the streets of a sweet little town makes for quite a bizarre spectacle and, 30 years later, the visual effects hold up rather well, despite or because of not approaching the uncanny-valley standards of what could be achieved now. And this weird game is also like something MR James might have dreamed up if he had worked in Hollywood. As for Williams himself, his wild-man routine is only in evidence in his opening scenes; otherwise he dials it down, perhaps sensing that the way to upstage the loony creatures is to be relatively rational. There is something touchingly innocent in his performance.
• Jumanji is in UK cinemas from 5 September.
